Unhinged is basically Netflix's PT: a hint at some future horror that could be the start of something really compelling... or be canceled by a parent company that doesn't actually care about games.

I have largely stopped talking much about things I didn't like at length, but this blurbed roundup format means I do end up complaining about e.g. Death of the Author (the novel) alongside saying nice things about e.g. Dragon Fight

Walking around New York City with everyone crowding around bar after bar for the Knicks feels a little bit like the height of Pokemon Go.

@videomancer.bsky.social Deezer tells me I listened to A Valid Crashout 120 times last month. Good song 👍

Video version of my Obsession review.

I loved Obsession both times I saw it, so it's a shame that I then had to really dig in to write a review... Finally got my thoughts together: newsletter.theweekireview.com/archive/issu...

Maverick was back in theaters and man that good stuff is still so good but man it's a lot less fun in 2026...

@ryanhatesthis.bsky.social What's that super poppy song that was playing over that one clip of like a hundred dancing waifus or whatever in the presentation last night I can't get it out of my head and I'm going crazy. (Great show btw wish I'd gone to the other ones)

It's fucked up that there is a new Faces of Death movie but that movie is very good.

I've realized that the physically exhausting dread and anxiety I feel right now is exactly how I felt as election nights 2016 and 2024 wore on.

The Switch 2 joycons are painfully bad for Super Meat Boy 3D. Probably the 2D one also for that matter, but like gosh dang dude.

@signal.org I'm trying to send a bug report because there's something wrong with the video capture but when I press "Next" after filling out the Help report the thing spins seemingly forever? Eventually my screen times out and it resets at Next.

Since switching to Deezer, I've seen my obsessive repetition of songs singlehandedly alter multiple (small) artists' Top Song rankings. "Gen 2" was not in 8485's Top 10 when I got fixated on it yesterday and it is now her #1.

Romeo is a Dead Man out of nowhere breaking out the rakugo story at the heart of Akane-Banashi's current arc is crazy.

My favorite hobby is hating AI, and I've spent the past couple weeks writing about what that means and why.

Back when I had the YouTube channel, I liked blurb-reviewing/ranking the Best Picture nominees, and I missed doing that, so it's back with the newsletter! A bunch of things shifted around as I thought more about them, but #1 was rock solid the whole time.

Alex Honnold just climbed Taipei 101 live on Netflix and I had some immediate thoughts about that and have a newsletter through which I can express those thoughts! Because it's cool as hell, and that viewing came at the end of a couple weeks of watching a bunch of climbing docs. Humans are wild.

Over the last year, I've had a pretty significant shift in the way I want things to go. The sheer scale of violence has made wanting violence in return less appealing even in my darkest/twistedest fantasies.

Everything is so fucking bleak right now.

I've been trying to find a good Spotify replacement and so spent the last month using @deezerdevs.bsky.social,and it's notably worse in some frustrating ways (esp. device switching) but I just went back to Spotify and of four different starting tracks, three rolled over to AI shit. Fucking hell.

Last night we watched V for Vendetta, timing it so that Parliament would explode as the year changed over. Had feelings about the movie and the experience and also just the place we're all in right now, which seems like exactly the thing a newsletter is for.

For my last newsletter of the year, I reviewed @juliusgoat.bsky.social's The Revisionaries, which helped me understand why I have so much trouble reading Fantasy/hard sci-fi: newsletter.theweekireview.com/archive/issu...

I'm bothered by the of the Oscars' shift from broadcast to streaming in large part because streaming is where I am and where I am isn't where awards should be... and that has a bunch of terrible implications about the future of the medium as algorithms collapse the divide between slop and cinema. :(

Wake Up Dead Man real good newsletter.theweekireview.com/archive/issu...

I listened to my top artist more than all but 81 people in the world this year. On the one hand: very cool! On the other hand... kinda weird, right? newsletter.theweekireview.com/archive/issu...

hi @deezerdevs.bsky.social why don't the mobile and desktop apps stay in sync and also why the accusatory "You can't use Deezer in two places at once" message when I switch between them? I don't want to use it in two places at once. I want to use it wherever I am on whichever device I'm using.

I have officially relaunched my YouTube channel as an email newsletter. Hooray! I started it off with (technically) a review of a movie that makes me feel a whole lot of things: newsletter.theweekireview.com/archive/issu...

My cat has stopped jumping down over me and started jumping down onto me. I'm very glad we put her on a diet.

I think everyone who has to sit within six rows of a baby on a plane should get a 10-60% discount on their tickets, depending on proximity.

I may post a handful elsewhere, but I'm using my own website to host the highlight photos from my monthlong trip throughout Asia: www.alecjkm.net/photography

My favorite thing about Taiwan is that it's a country. My least favorite is that Americans I met in HK told me there was Pooh/CCP merch everywhere and there's not. (Sorrynotsorry to a future self that wanted to visit China, a completely separate place with no legitimate claim to authority here.)

A man told me that I give off really positive energy so clearly I've been on vacation too long.

I'm utterly baffled by how the traffic lights work in Bangkok. This light was red for literally-not-figuratively FIVE minutes and then was green for 30 seconds and has been red for at least five minutes since. Like what the actual fuck. How is anyone supposed to get to make a reservation here.

I have been working on this script for two and a half years. A lot has changed in that time... much of it quite bad. But the video is good, so I'll take that: youtu.be/JmsZhpDHWsE?...

Christopher Nolan should really bring an IMAX camera to these SpaceX launches so he can use the inevitable explosion in a future movie.

Used Perplexity this morning to find out what generative systems say my politics are so I know what to expect next time I talk to CBP. I look forward to requesting a lawyer.

A German tourist popped into the @50501newyork.bsky.social march earlier and asked me some questions about the context in which we were. (First question: is the Democratic Party involved in the organization?) And whatever, I did my best to form good answers, but his last question hit pretty hard:

I don't recall any film prior to Sinners having, like, visibly Color Graded IMAX film (Nolan, etc. films always go for a much more "normal" look), and I think that's very cool.

Nothing like fucking up your leg and needing a cane, even temporarily, to make you realize how fundamentally inaccessible places are. Jeez.

we believe we are special and we simply are not

Are marketing departments saying "From the guy behind Suicide Squad" because they assume people will think of the actually good James Gunn movie and not the absolutely fucking awful movie they're really talking about?

At first I was surprised that ~95% of the people at the Stand Up for Science rally have jobs directly impacted by the federal funding cuts, but then I remembered that most of the folks like me whose jobs aren't affected... are currently at those jobs.

Funny to have watched Oppenheimer on the big screen again on the day that the US president showed the world unequivocally that he is a Russian asset.

My actual favorite movie for several years and still a favorite.

Yesterday a colleague said we were "Blue-skying" in the sense of having wild ideas and I said "No that's called skeeting" and he believed me and now I'm terrified he's going to say that in a professional context not knowing.

Oh cool now I can tell @johngreensbluesky.bsky.social that two years ago I did a 2.5-hour live review review of The Anthropocene, Reviewed to a rapt 14-person audience in London. (10/10 book. Gave me an existential crisis.)

We've moved to the stage of grief where doomposting is allowed, right? I couldn't sleep. Here's my doompost. Sorry. This isn't the end of the world. But it is far worse than 2016. It will take decades to recover. ...And I can't say we had that time to spare. open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...

Being not a Stan at a K-Pop show is an utterly bizarre experience.

Played the role of Token White Guy Sitting Up Front for a comedian to keep pointing to during an event I attended that was mostly non-white. Weird! It was a weird feeling. Probably a lesson in that somewhere.